ABSTRACT
The term ‘pluralism’ can be used to describe a very wide range of philosophical and political ideas. Dunleavy and O'Leary (1987, p. 13) begin their account of the theory with the statement, ‘pluralism is the belief that there are, or ought to be, many things. It offers a defence of multiplicity in beliefs, institutions and societies and opposes ‘monism’ – the belief that there is, or ought to be, only one thing.’ Alford and Friedland (1985) postulate a pluralist ‘home domain’ of theory, which spans a wide range of ideas broadly equated with methodological individualism and situational studies of power. For the purposes of this book, already wide-ranging enough, a narrower focus will be adopted. In this chapter we shall concentrate on a theoretical perspective that has been developed particularly in the context of American political practice but also has affinities with certain traditions of British political thought. Waste (1987, p. 3) describes this perspective as ‘the view that public policy … is the result of a tug of war – often ending in a delicate balance or compromise between various interest groups’. Polsby (1980, pp.153–7) writes of ‘an intellectual tradition that has some strength in American political theory … showing some indebtedness to writers as varied as Madison, Tocqueville, Montesquieu and Locke’. We shall trace this intellectual tradition and the methodological questions surrounding it, focusing on the work of the ‘analytical’ pluralists, Bentley and Truman, the ‘institutional’ pluralists, Schumpeter, Lindblom and Dahl, and the critics of both schools. Here, attention is given mainly to American theory, although pluralist thought also developed strongly in Britain (see Nicholls, 1975).
